Florence's Joe Frappolli on brink of 300th football win

It's 1:20 p.m. on a sunny Monday afternoon and a 70-year-old man is driving a tractor across an open field in Burlington County.

Joe Frappolli is no farmer. He's a football coach. And he's spent 44 years working the same ground, a swath of white-lined grass that is 53 yards wide and 100 yards long.

Frappolli has been Florence High School's football coach since 1974. He held his first practice a couple of weeks after Richard Nixon resigned as the country's 37th president.

On Friday night, Frappolli likely will win his 300th game, becoming just the second coach in South Jersey history to reach that milestone.

But early Monday afternoon, while his players were still in class and his assistants were still at work, Frappolli looked more like an equipment man than a legendary coach.

"I like to get everything out there so we can get right to work when my assistants and the players get here," Frappolli said after dropping large bags with pads and footballs on the practice field.

He still had to fill three large orange buckets with water, set up the team room for film study and prepare remarks for his team, which was reeling a bit from a 52-0 loss to powerful Penns Grove last Friday night.

"I told them to stay home Saturday, get away from it," Frappolli said. "We'll get back after it today."

The coach can handle a lopsided loss. He's been through his share, although he's been on the other side of the scoreboard far more often during a career in which he has compiled a 299-139-5 record, with a couple of dozen division titles, six sectional titles and a 43-game winning streak.

The setback to the high-powered Red Devils was disappointing but not devastating. He saw it as another teachable moment.

"How are we going to handle this? How we going to bounce back?" Frappolli wondered. "That's what I want to see."

For the coach, the same goes with the attention paid to his approach to win No. 300, which could come on Friday night at Maple Shade.

"I tell these kids, 'This is your team, not my team,'" Frappolli said. "I'll be happy when [the countdown to 300] is over. I want them to make the most of this football season for them. I ask them, 'What do you want to be your identity? When you walk away, what are you going to remember?'"

For generations, football players at the small school have walked away with memories of the demanding coach who built the Flashes into a program that reflected both his own no-nonsense approach and the blue-collar mentality of the little town on a bend in the Delaware River.

"I'd love to say, 'Hey, let's play a video game,' " Frappolli said. "But that's not our game. We're rocks and bottles."

Those words — "Rocks and Bottles" — are written in red across the top of the whiteboard in the Flashes' team room. That's been Frappolli's motto since Day One, his firm belief that Florence would win football games only if his athletes were willing to scrap on every play.

That started in 1974, when the coach took over at his alma mater. He doesn't remember his first win. But he remembers the theme of his first season.

"We were a soft team," Frappolli said. "Ponytails sticking out [the back of helmets]. It was a different world.

"Back then you could do a lot more in the way of physical toughness. I think we lost a couple of games on the practice field.

"We had to break that mentality that you just go out there and dance with people, arm tackle people.We used to hit every day. We always were in full equipment. There was no such thing as not wearing full equipment."

Frappolli's teams have been renown for their gritty play. But they've won as well, capturing the South Jersey Group 1 title in 1985 and the Central Jersey Group 1 title in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2012.

Frappolli still misses the "Pit," the team's famous old home field, and the Saturday afternoon games when seemingly half the population of the town would stand behind the fence and cheer for the Flashes.

"I still hear from people, 'Why can't you play in the 'Pit?' " Frappolli said. "I tell them it's not there anymore."

Outside the team's field house, there's a concrete container filled with "Pit dirt" with these words inscribed on the top: "YOU will always be part of the PIT; the PIT will always be part of YOU."

Said Frappolli: "The Pit was a place. But it also was a mentality."

The monument to a field that closed in 2006 makes Frappolli think back to the old days. So does the approach of his 300th victory.

"You know what 300 is?" Frappolli said. "Lot of great memories. Great individual players. My assistants, so loyal. I get a kick, my wife shows me on Facebook they post pictures of old teams, old games, and it just bring back the journey of life.

"That's what it is for me. It's relationships. It's the journey that you've been on, the highs and the lows, the ups and the downs."

Frappolli regards coaching as a "platform" for teaching life lessons.

"Same things as always: Hard work, discipline, unselfishness, team first," Frappolli said.

So it was in 1974. So it is today.

He's not a farmer. He's a football coach.

But he drives a tractor across empty fields on sunny fall afternoons and he's planted a lot of seeds over the long course of his life.

Here are South Jersey's all-time leaders in football coaching wins: